IT’S HARDER than death metal. More explicit than gangsta rap. Its lyrics routinely — and graphically — detail murder, rape and kidnapping. And it’s incredibly popular with some listeners.

It’s called horrorcore, a subgenre of hip-hop that is still comparatively small, but one with fans that rank among the most committed in all of music.

And one of its leading proponents is Pittsburg’s own Mars. The rapper ranks as one of the subgenre’s top artists, and he also manages a record label that represents other horrorcore acts, including San Jose’s Kung Fu Vampire.

The 30-year-old Mars, whose real name is Mario Delgado, is out to shock and entertain his listeners every time he hits the stage. It starts when he dons his mask, one that is instantly recognizable to fans of horror films.

“It’s a Hannibal Lecter-style mask, from ‘Silence of the Lambs,'” says Mars, who was born in Antioch. “It’s become real symbolic to me. So many people don’t understand what we do, and they want to silence what we do.”

Horrorcore artists take the same type of content found in horror movies and put it into song. Mars says what he’s doing isn’t all that different from what is accomplished by Wes Craven, John Carpenter and other top horror film directors — he just does it in a different form of media. Yet, while those filmmakers are applauded, Mars and other horrorcore artists are commonly cast as being dangerous to society.

“There is the Fear Network on TV,” Mars points out. “There is a horror section in Blockbuster or Netflix.”

The horrorcore genre got its start in the early ’90s, when a few hip-hop artists began to incorporate elaborate, bloody story lines into their rhymes, often layered over eerie, ominous soundtracks that sounded straight out of some horror movie. They soon added costumes and other theatrics to their performances, to strengthen the connection to horror films. The epicenter was Detroit, which produced the one horrorcore act that has somewhat become a mainstream name — the Insane Clown Posse.

The music that these acts began churning out was harder — indeed, more insane — than anything that had come before, at least in terms of lyrical content.

“You listen to gangsta rap, and it’s already talking about murder and selling drugs. It’s really dark,” Mars says. “But you think that’s bad? All that gangsta rap is below what we do in terms of shock value.

“Horrorcore is all about pushing the envelope. All these kids, they want to be like — ‘Oh, I can’t believe they are saying that.’ It’s our job to say that.”

Mars grew up listening to gangsta rap and horrorcore, so he knew exactly what kind of rapper he wanted to be when first picked up the microphone at age 18. He released his debut, “S.I.D.S (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome),” in 1998, and hasn’t looked back since.

Been there himself

He’s sympathizes with his fans who have to fight for the right to listen to the controversial horrorcore material. He’s been there himself, he says, and it’s tough.

“I’ve had my family take these (horrorcore) posters off the wall and say that, ‘You are bringing evil into the house,'” he remembers. “I think the fans, at home, have a lot of explaining to do. But I get it. I wouldn’t want my kid to listen to the stuff I do.”

Some parents, however, aren’t all that worried. Veda Hellevik, a 40-year-old mother of two from Martinez, is a big horrorcore fan and she has no problem with her kids attending local shows, such as the one held Saturday at the Red House in Walnut Creek.

“There have never been any acts of aggression,” she says of the crowds at horrorcore shows. “It’s like a family.

“In every generation, there is a type of music that parents can’t stand. In the ’80s, it was heavy metal. The (horrorcore artists) are putting on a show — just like KISS, just like Ozzy, just like Marilyn Manson.”

That type of understanding isn’t commonplace. It’s certainly not representative of the comment that Ralph Hernandez, a 23-year-old horrorcore fan from Pittsburg, hears most frequently.

“It’s like, ‘How can you listen to that garbage?'” Hernandez says. “It’s just music. It’s just entertainment. It’s not like we are different from everyone else just because we listen to a certain type of music.”

Much of the controversy surrounding the subgenre stems from two cases that generated mass media coverage, both of which were linked to horrorcore music.

The first came in 2005, when Jeff Weise, a high school student in Red Lake, Minn., went on a shooting spree that killed nine people and wounded five others. The second was in 2009, when Castro Valley’s Richard Alden Samuel McCroskey III was arrested for allegedly murdering four people in Farmville, Va.

Weise and McCroskey reportedly were avid horrorcore listeners — and the latter was a horrorcore artist, performing under the moniker “Syko Sam.” Both were also allegedly big Mars fans, which led the media directly to his doorstep. Instead of shying away from the reporters’ questions, Mars embraced the attention.

“It kind of made me the unofficial spokesman, or the go-to guy to talk to, for the genre,” says Mars, noting that his record sales went up significantly after the media swirl.

Responsibility question

He feels in no way responsible for these tragedies, noting again that the role horrorcore plays in such cases is disproportionally valued over that of film, TV, books and other styles of music.

“There are screwed up people who do these things all the time, who probably listen to Garth Brooks,” Mars says. “And you can’t blame him.”

He does, however, feel that horrorcore artists do have a responsibility toward kids that might be headed down the wrong path.

“I think that the responsibility is to give those kids an outlet,” he says. “Obviously, those kids (Weise and McCroskey) chose the wrong outlet.”

People might assume that Mars’ outlet — his way for releasing some of the energy inside him — comes from watching horror movies. But they’d be wrong.

Jim Harrington is the pop music critic for the Bay Area News Group. He began writing about the Bay Area music scene in 1992 and became the full-time pop music critic for the organization's Oakland Tribune in 2006. He is a South Bay native and graduate of San Francisco State University.

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